The project is directed at exploring the following six questions: 1) What is the importance that grandparenthood seems to hold for most adults? 2) What is the range of role-behaviors in which grandparents engage? 3) What kind of information conveys real meaning about the actual nature of grandparenthood relationships? 4) What are the relationships among an individual's experience as a grandchild, his expectations about being a grandparent, and his actual experience as a grandparent? What do these relationships suggest about the connections between aspects of development in lifestyle stages that are temporally distant from one another, and about connectionss between grandparenthood and mental health? 5) What is the role of Symbolic Meaning in the individual's subjective experience of grandparenthood? 6) What is the validity of this five-dimension framework devised for understanding grandparenthood? Questions 1, 2, and 3 represent issues that remain unsatisfactorily resolved in previous research on the meaning and significance of grandparenthood. Questions 4 and 5 have emerged to address the arenas in which I think the answers to the first three questions will lie. Question 6 represents an attempt of statistical validation of the theoretical framework I have devised in order to integrate data on grandparenthood emerging from disparate research fields. Validation of the framework would facilitate the development of an instrument with which to re-investigate the first five questions are to be explored through a series of five intensive, largely open-ended interviews with each of 20 respondents. The interviews for each R. are to be transcribed and interpreted according to my five-dimension framework, to psychodynamic and psychosocial theories of human development and to indices of mental health. Trends within individual protocols and among R's are to be used to address questions 1-5. Question 6 is to be addressed through the factor analysis of Likert-type questionnaires administered to 500 subjects.